Copy Me This
05 Oct 2017
Back in freshman year of college, I learned how to program in C through enrolling in my first engineering class. Learning C involved a lot of copying what my instructor did and searching Google for additional examples. Being the naive programmer I was, I didn’t always care to understand how every line of code fit in to my program to make it work. In particular, I had no idea what #include stdio.h did. I saw it in my professor’s code, so I simply copied it and everything seemed to work the way I expected it to. It wasn’t until later in the course, when I omitted the library, that I realized that including stdio.h allowed me to use the useful and common C commands like printf() and scanf().
After this correction, I understood that including various libraries at the top of my code can allow me to use functions in the current file that were defined elsewhere. I also figured out that not only could I include header files in which I created, but that there are pre-made libraries such as string.h that make coding in C much less tedious. C is already a tedious language as it is, there was no need to make it any harder on myself to define functions that were already defined in a library I could #include.
Deja Vu
Fast forward to my senior year in college where I am learning HTML/CSS for website development, and I feel like I’m having deja vu. While they are awesome programming languages for creating custom and responsive websites, I feel that it’s unnecessarily tedious and time consuming to make things look nice. What if there was something that simplified web development and made it easy to create a pleasant website without the hassle of losing hours to customization enhancements. Something similar to how a pre-made library made finding the length of a string in C as simple as calling the strlen() function.
This is where User Interface Frameworks can help.
Mokey See, Monkey Do
A UI framework is essentially a library for web development that provides a means to create a good website in a short amount of time. By using a UI framework on top of HTML/CSS, the user can utilize complex functions through the provided APIs that would normally require custom and unintuitive HTML/CSS code. From the perspective of a novice web developer, a proper UI framework can help them create more interactive and customized websites without getting bogged down in the complexity making custom stylesheets. It can also help create a good-looking website as nearly all UI frameworks provide to the user a decent look-and-feel with each tool.
Rewards, Rewards, REWARDS
Learning a UI framework can be quite challenging, and this was the case when I learned Semantic UI during the past week. While I could have just stuck to using HTML/CSS, the benefit of using a UI framework comes with the amount of time I could save utilizing the built-in API’s.
Time that I spend on creating stylesheets in CSS is time I could have spent on adding functionality to the website. By using UI frameworks such as Semantic UI, I can quickly get a working skeleton of my final product that has all my desired actions. Furthermore, because UI frameworks run on top of HTML/CSS, I can, provided I have leftover sanity, go back and implement my own stylesheets to further customize the look of the website. Overall, this process of quickly being about to build what I want and worry about customizing later is why everyone should take the time to learn a UI framework of their choosing.